Google has given us some top banana news to help web designers by now creating a new algorithm to help index flash sites. Search engine optimisers can relax when a client comes to them with a flash site and says “right, do your magic!”
Read below for a top class article from Web Master Central which gives you the run down on what, when and where Google will crawl a flash site.
“We’ve received numerous requests to improve our indexing of Adobe Flash files. Today, Ron Adler and Janis Stipins—software engineers on our indexing team—will provide us with more in-depth information about our recent announcement that we’ve greatly improved our ability to index Flash.”
Q: Which Flash files can Google better index now?
We’ve improved our ability to index textual content in SWF files of all kinds. This includes Flash “gadgets” such as buttons or menus, self-contained Flash websites, and everything in between.
Q: What content can Google better index from these Flash files?
All of the text that users can see as they interact with your Flash file. If your website contains Flash, the textual content in your Flash files can be used when Google generates a snippet for your website. Also, the words that appear in your Flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches.
In addition to finding and indexing the textual content in Flash files, we’re also discovering URLs that appear in Flash files, and feeding them into our crawling pipeline—just like we do with URLs that appear in non-Flash webpages. For example, if your Flash application contains links to pages inside your website, Google may now be better able to discover and crawl more of your website.
Q: What about non-textual content, such as images?
At present, we are only discovering and indexing textual content in Flash files. If your Flash files only include images, we will not recognize or index any text that may appear in those images. Similarly, we do not generate any anchor text for Flash buttons which target some URL, but which have no associated text.
Also note that we do not index FLV files, such as the videos that play on YouTube, because these files contain no text elements.
Q: How does Google “see” the contents of a Flash file?
We’ve developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. Our algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, and that content is then available to be indexed. We can’t tell you all of the proprietary details, but we can tell you that the algorithm’s effectiveness was improved by utilizing Adobe’s new Searchable SWF library.
Q: What do I need to do to get Google to index the text in my Flash files?
Basically, you don’t need to do anything. The improvements that we have made do not require any special action on the part of web designers or webmasters. If you have Flash content on your website, we will automatically begin to index it, up to the limits of our current technical ability (see next question).
That said, you should be aware that Google is now able to see the text that appears to visitors of your website. If you prefer Google to ignore your less informative content, such as a “copyright” or “loading” message, consider replacing the text within an image, which will make it effectively invisible to us.
Q: What are the current technical limitations of Google’s ability to index Flash?
There are three main limitations at present, and we are already working on resolving them:
1. Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.
2. We currently do not attach content from external resources that are loaded by your Flash files. If your Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file, another SWF file, etc., Google will separately index that resource, but it will not yet be considered to be part of the content in your Flash file.
3. While we are able to index Flash in almost all of the languages found on the web, currently there are difficulties with Flash content written in bidirectional languages. Until this is fixed, we will be unable to index Hebrew language or Arabic language content from Flash files.
We’re already making progress on these issues, so stay tuned!””
Posted by Ron Adler, Janis Stipins, and Maile Ohye @ google webmaster central.blogspot.com
Filed under: Google | Tagged: flash indexed by google, google flash, Google index Flash, New Algorithm for Indexing Flash
It is fantastic news in that Google is now able to index Flash files, and a long time coming. However (and this is a ‘however’ in bolded type to a font weight of 600), I fear that this move may give designers carte blanche to create Flash only sites.
From past experience, I have seen many uses and abuses of Flash. One common factor I have found is the issue of accessibility. Though most web browsers are able to use Flash, Adobe’s file format cannot be scaled without loss of resolution. Such sites cannot be read and navigated in text only browsers like Lynx.
HTML is still a more dependable format. The text is scaleable and editable without the need for specialist proprietary software like Flash. Text can be scaled according to one’s eyesight (or lack of eyesight). Code can be edited in a simple notepad type file on anything from a Windows PC to a Mac, Linux box, or an Amiga 500.
Flash requires additional plug-ins, some of which unsupported on older browsers - and certainly not in Lynx.
On an SEO point of view, could the splash page be back? I jolly well hope not! From previous observations and experience, nothing annoys me more than a ponderous splash page with accessibility deficient animations (bad for anyone with photo-sensitive epilepsy or autism spectrum disorders), which probably hinders rather than helps prospective customers.
Stuart.
Well said Stuart. A true SEO god, with the word smiting skills of Sir William Wobble dagger him self.